


Saint Adelaide

by grayglube



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, hurt comfort, slight angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 14:01:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7108093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She walks around the city in the aftermath and looks at faces, watches other people walk, they don’t see anything, and they don’t realize the tissue-thin fabric of one world against the other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saint Adelaide

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something I wrote on vacation, saint adelaide is the patron saint of brides, widows, and prisoners

It’s nothing as simple and clean as innocence that Alec has that she sees against the 100 watt backdrop experience has provided her with. He creates the stark contrast of reluctance like a long shadow in late afternoon.

 

He won’t acquiesce to interrogation and detainment, let alone anything that enters the territory of pain or discomfort with downworlders, not normally. She tells him about John and her grief is what she’s made it, currency. It used to be something else.

 

Not just pain, there’s always pain, around her spine like a hair thin wire to keep her from comfort but standing upright.

 

Not just grief, it’s always there, she wears the rune for it on her arm where he used to squeeze, where she still expects the heat and weight of his hand when she turns over in bed.

 

Not just shame, it’s never left, she lost John and she lost something that someone like Alec might call honor, she lost whatever blind faith she had in balanced scales or a ledger kept out of the red.

 

She’ll pull teeth and fingernails, she’ll maim in worse ways if she needs too.

 

Seelie’s are easy, she doesn’t have to resort to true brutality. It’s a soft sell to get information, iron bounds, kept away from sunlight, from water and earth, the cell is cement, there’s nothing natural about the food.

 

She could show Alec it’s not all about pain when you interrogate. It’s nothing that would turn the stomach, there are no smells that come common with torture, no blood, waste, or sour sweat.

 

Seelie wither. She’s watched it happen. A leader does the hard thing, the brutal thing, the deciding thing.

 

She tried to be a leader while she tried to be a lover and a wife and now it’s what’s left, all that’s left. She tries, she does more than try, mostly it works and Alec listens, even if he doesn't understand. He’s not just standing on his own.

 

There’s his sister, Jace, his parents, every member of the Institute. He has distractions, obligations, expectations. She has herself and her mission, she understands.

 

She tells him about John.

 

He lets her lead him in this.

 

* * *

 

 

Isabelle tries.

 

Lydia knows it’s not something that comes natural.

 

She’ll never be effective enough to lead, she’s not even a right hand, Lydia looks at Isabelle and knows she’s third in line behind the class favorite if there ever was a metaphor that fit. It’s because she’s not selfless enough, or selfish enough, Isabelle cares, too much.

 

There’s nothing as final or as self-propelling as true detachment in Idris.

 

Lydia sees Isabelle falter and it’s weakness in a leader, but for a soldier it’s efficiency, dependability, predictability, Isabelle will sacrifice for the greater good so long as someone tells her what it is and means it.

 

Lydia hopes there’s never a war because Isabelle wouldn’t survive it. You can never save everyone, and Isabelle would try anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

She gets out of the infirmary to a world in disarray. Alec is despondent, his Parabatai has abandoned them. Isabelle is lost, anchorless as everyone around her reacts the same way to losing Jace. Clary is silent and pale, the happiness of having her mother back is tempered.

 

Lydia doesn’t feel guilty about things but she does wonder if she will later, if there are choices she’ll be a part of making that will cause pain.

 

If Jace is a traitor she knows what will happen.

 

She hopes it doesn’t come to that but there’s always the possibility of being surprised by someone, what they're capable of.

 

Alec and Clary say that Jace must have a plan, she nods, says nothing and hopes they’re right because all the alternatives are worse.

 

Valentine is making an army.

 

Their ranks are too thin to make a difference.

 

She’s got to make sure that changes, she shuffles so often between Idris and New York she isn’t sure right away when she wakes up in the morning where she is.

 

* * *

 

 

She slept with Jace.

 

He came up next to her on the altar and said things he doesn’t say often, and later when everyone had given her space to decompress and do whatever brides left at the altar do she comes up next to him.

 

He’s the only person in the surveillance room, “You don’t have to be here. I got this.” He’s seen her coming on one of the bottom screens.

 

She stands closer than she usually would. Her hair is tight and heavy in its festive coils but in her sneakers and civilian track suit she feels like going out into the city.

 

He half grins, “Nice hair.”

 

"How long do you think it will take them to take everything down?” She asks.

 

“Hours.”

 

There’s a plate of half-finished food on the electronic console next to two fingers of whiskey. “Are you going to finish that?”

 

“I brought the bottle.”

 

She picks up the chicken leg left on the plate first and the skin slips off into her mouth, she wonders how much food they’ll all have to eat in the next few days, she’s already regretting having to go back to Idris. The marrow on the bone-ends pops between her teeth, mock disgust pulls at his face.

 

“Most people like the white meat but the dark is the juiciest.” She tells him.

 

“You gonna suck the marrow out too?” He toes over the garbage pail.

 

She drinks the whiskey, their fingerprints are both on the glass in grease, she wipes at them. She cleans her fingers with an ice-cube, flicks water in his direction but he leans out of range.

 

“You’re leaving tonight.” He says. It’s a statement of fact.

 

“Yeah,” she grins, watches the screens and a silent Isabelle direct everyone into taking down banners and move flowers and break down tables. “She made everything so beautiful," the warmth of the whiskey makes her sigh, "Everything.”

 

“It was nice.”

 

“Did you steal this from somewhere?” She pours more whiskey, drinks half and slides him the rest. He shrugs and pulls on his rolled sleeves, He’s dressed back down; no more cuff links, no tie, no waistcoat, his boots are back. “I didn’t think you’d miss it.”

 

“There was a bottle of champagne in the room but it gives me a headache so I left it there.”

 

“Do people do that still?”

 

“I don’t know if it’s meant to be overly ‘just married’ or if Isabelle was trying to be,” she stops, not wanting to sound like she upset, she isn’t, Isabelle was angry with her, with Alec, now there’s no reason for any of that.

 

Jace drinks, “a bitch?”

 

Lydia nods, warming after she sips a final splash when he hands her back the glass. Her face feels warmer and her head lighter, things seem easier, simpler, better than before the wedding. “It’s all very overdone, like a movie.”

 

“You didn’t have that before?”

 

“John and I got married and didn’t tell anyone,” she doesn’t want to talk about weddings, she doesn’t want to get maudlin about things but Jace looks at her like he feels bad for her. Her grin is slow and lopsided, she finishes the glass before she says, “there wasn’t champagne and flowers, we just went back to my quarters in Idris and fucked. In a chair.”

 

She laughs and Jace is smiling, he’s not one to laugh lately but he does say, “that sounds better anyway.” She nods, and then there’s the emptiness when she thinks of John. Jace still looks at the screens, smile dissolved, he looks empty too. “Are you alright?” He doesn’t answer, but he wouldn’t tell her the truth if he did, she shakes her head, smiles, starts to say she’ll go and let him handle surveillance and he’s already shackled her wrist in his bigger hand and his mouth is open over hers.

 

The words are easy, she’s been trying to say them since she came up next to him, 'You should come see all the hard work they did on the room,' but instead she makes it simpler, "We should sleep together."  

 

His cut-off laugh is warm on her lips, it tastes like whiskey and his heat, “Yeah, sure.” He says it soft and sure and the walk back to her room is something she barely feels or sees.

 

It’s a bower of flowers and she stands in the middle of it when Jace yanks down the zipper of her sweat-jacket, her breasts are in his hands and he holds them like it’s something casual. There’s a mixed sense of self-assurance and fatigue in him but when she reaches for his belt it’s like he wakes up, one hand presses over hers to make her feel the shape of him through his slacks.

 

It’s like he’s been half-alive since he learned the truth about Clary. She can relate.

 

She pushes on the back of each sneaker and toes them away, he pulls the bow on her pants and pushes them down with her utilitarian panties. She’s wet. He touches her gently, probing and careful and tilts his head when he feels how slick she is, like it’s a secret or something he didn’t expect. She's still staring at his face when he pushes them inside of her, his mouth open and his breath slow, steady like the rhythm between her legs.

 

She doesn't want to shut her eyes but it's like trying to stare at the sun as her pulse becomes a more insistent, animal thing against his hand. His hand comes away and two fingers trail damply over the inside of her thigh, the flare of her hip.

 

He lets her unthread his buttons and unbuckle his belt, he reaches behind him to pull down the white sheets with their flower petals and confetti  before she pushes him to the bed. He lifts his hips for her to pull off his slacks. Their efficiency feels practiced but she knows they’re both just perceptive, he catches the way she presses closer in a curve against him when his hand squeezes tighter he should, and she feels his hips stutter up when her hands and fingers ghost over his ribs, his shoulders, the back of his hips.

 

He admits he can’t remember the right rune when he doesn’t see the variation of protection anywhere on her, she teaches him the shape of it, and admits she didn’t expect needing to use it, he looks at her and understands that she’s known about Alec, the impossibility of intimacy. The sear of the Rune is clarifying, it sharpens everything and suddenly there's desperate eagerness in them both instead of lazy compliance.

 

He drags her closer with strong hands on the backs of her thighs, pressing them open and she’s holding his cock in her almost open hand to help. He covers her and she missed the weight of someone, muscled arms and a strong back, his ass under her hands while he pumps inside of her, the stretch and achy fullness.

 

The things that can’t be replicated any other way, cramping thighs from being wrapped around someone else’s hips and thighs, the labor of breathing while under someone, the line of a jaw against her cheek, the scrape of the gold hair on his chest over her nipples or the scratch of it along her stomach, a mouth on her neck.

 

The thick heat of him coming.

 

The grinding up in circles to find her orgasm.

 

Someone watching her while she does.

 

After they’ve unstuck themselves to lie on their backs and catch up to their breath, she asks how long until he’s hard again.

 

“Not long.”

 

“Good.”

 

She means to leave New York with the bitter taste of him in her mouth, she wants him to remember the scent of her and maybe they'll both feel less lonely for awhile.

 

The day is not at all how she expected. He wraps her braids around his knuckles when she puts her mouth around him.

 

He tells her how good her ass looks when she leaves him in bed to pull on her pants. She smiles, he flops back to the pillows lamenting that he has to follow and get dressed. She tells him they'll always need Shadowhunters from the Institute to train the ones in Idris.

 

She's leaving with no one to watch her go, a quiet exit. She opens the wall and tries to feel some sort of gravity as she holds the Cup. She tries to weigh it's deeds with her hands, it's light and for all it is it's like any other impractical chalice. When she turns to find Hodge she finds that she isn't afraid, just surprised and embarrassed when he gets the first hit on her and that it grounds her immediately. She wakes up to the infirmary later.

 

* * *

 

When they win she knows it’s not a real victory, things don’t end tidy and clean.

 

She walks around the city in the aftermath and looks at faces, watches other people walk, they don’t see anything, and they don’t realize the tissue-thin fabric of one world against the other.

 

They aren’t finished yet.

 

Her phone rings. She wants, inexplicably to let it ring, she picks up before it goes to voicemail.

 


End file.
